How to disable dnsmasq on ubuntu based distribution

dnsmasq is a lightweight DNS, TFTP, PXE, router advertisement and DHCP server. It is intended to provide coupled DNS and DHCP service to a LAN.
From time to time dnsmasq decided to resolve some hosts over a VPN tunnel to their external IP address instead the internal one. This was quite annoying... After digging a little bit I found that the root cause of all my VPN heartache was the dnsmasq daemon controlling my DNS. And, related, network-manager. Ok, so how can we disable dnsmasq?!